Notes

An ongoing collection of songs that transform, emulate, or shed new light on other works of art—from stories and poems to paintings and sculptures. Send your own recommendation to hello@theatlantic.com and please tell us a little bit about why you’ve chosen it.

David Safran is somewhat known in Chicago as both a singer-songwriter and essayist, but he never really caught on beyond our city. Neither did his song—“Adult Things” was self-released in 2009 to not much buzz. However, it feels like a right suggestion since it wasn’t just inspired by Eugene Field, the children’s poet, but written directly at Field’s graveside. Safran wrote an essay in 2011 about “Adult Things.” He mentioned,

The 19th century writer, Eugene Field, is buried—reinterred—in a small, shoddy cloister garden at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Kenilworth, Illinois. Once or twice a month, I would travel to Holy Comforter. The parish secretary informed me I was the first Eugene Field visitor in 17 years. I admired his writing, I wasn’t overenthusiastic, but we were both locked away on the North Shore, and I needed a dead literary neighbor.

While there’s an October 2016 Track of the Day based on a Field poem, Safran’s song doesn’t emphasize Field’s poetry but his failures as a local artist—a failure Safran seems to connect with. Though “Adult Things” deals specifically, and explicitly, with relationships (one bold couplet: “Nothing like sex to ruin / a sense of intimacy”), the song ends with its singer staring down at Field’s snow-covered grave, a “work that won’t endure,” realizing he’s aging fast and needs to find, or steal, some lyrics.

Like his song, Safran ended his “Adult Things” essay with this bit about posterity:

Time bowdlerizes everyone, especially Chicago artists. … Yet this gaunt, top-hatted, largely forgotten writer cannot fully disappear into oblivion while parks and elementary schools are still being named after him; while you can still find Love-Songs of Childhood at your library’s book sale; while youngish singer-songwriters still visit his grave: a soft, narrow spot wherein one can stand, or collapse, placidly.

Chicago artists, by the way, were the inspiration for this series—our first literary song was David Nagler’s interpretation of the Carl Sandburg poem “Chicago.” But if you’re looking (listening?) for music about a specific place—a beloved city, say, or a poet’s graveside—we’ve collected some reader recommendations here.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

Confession: I’ve never read one of Saul Bellow’s novels. (If you’ve got a strong case to make for which one I should start with, feel free to send me a note.) But I’ve been taught by enough people who love him to recognize his monumental place in American literature. Christopher Hitchens wrote about that influence in our November 2007 issue:

At Bellow’s memorial meeting ... the main speakers were Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Martin Amis, William Kennedy, and James Wood. ... Had it not been for an especially vapid speech by some forgettable rabbi, the platform would have been exclusively composed of non-Jews, many of them non-American. How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent? Putting this question to the speakers later on, I received two particularly memorable responses. Ian Mc­Ewan related his impression that Bellow, alone among American writers of his generation, had seemed to assimilate the whole European classical inheritance. And Martin Amis vividly remembered something Bellow had once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal. ...

Bellow in his time was to translate Isaac Bashevis Singer into English (and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” into Yiddish), but it mattered to him that the ghetto be transcended and that he, too, could sing America.

On that note, my colleague Emma has written a piece today about the complex history of Jewish identity in America, at a time when the self-described alt-right movement has given anti-Semitism an ugly new presence in public discourse. Read it here (and let us know if you have a related personal experience to share).

But speaking, as Hitchens does, of singing and transcendence and the translation of art into other forms and languages, I remember being thrilled to discover during a high-school AP English class that one of the Counting Crows songs I’d been listening to on repeat was titled after one of Bellow’s novels: Henderson the Rain King. The song’s narrator is scared, trapped, frustrated, and overlooked, and seems to invoke Henderson as a figure who represents many of those feelings:

Hey, I only want the same as anyone
Henderson is waiting for the sun
Oh, it seems night endlessly begins and ends ...

There’s a vision of freedom, though, in the wistful opening lines: “When I think of heaven ... I think of flying.”

Sever­al of his heroes and protagonists—including the thick-necked Henderson, his only non-Jewish central character—rise above the sickly and the merely bookish. They tackle lions and, in the case of Augie March, a truly fearsome eagle. They mix it up with revolutionaries and bandits and hard-core criminals. Commenting on Socrates’ famous dictum about the worthlessness of the unexamined life, the late Kurt Vonnegut once inquired: “What if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?” Bellow would have seen, and indeed did see, the force of this question. Like Lambert Strether’s in The Ambassadors, his provisional answer seems to have been: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” And the tough-guy Henderson, so gross and physical and intrepid (and so inarticulate when he speaks, yet so full of reflective capacity when he thinks), cannot repress his wonder when flying: He keeps pointing out that his is the first generation to have seen the clouds from above as well as below:

“What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something, somewhere.”

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

This poem reminds me that just because I failed at some endeavor—personal, political, or otherwise—does not mean that I was wrong for embarking on the endeavor in the first place. Cavafy’s poem is a two-fer, because Leonard Cohen adapted it in his song “Alexandra Leaving,” which is indeed how I discovered the original poem.

More Atlantic readers pay tribute to Cohen and highlight more of his songs here. His moodier music actually helped me get through the most difficult and painful breakup of my life, and “Anthem” was essential for that dark blue period. From the lyrics:

You can add up the parts
but you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

I love this song by the Simon Sisters, formed out of a famous poem. Carly Simon’s older sister, Lucy, had composed it. For a summer on the East Coast, dirt poor, they performed this in small clubs. The sisters caught on, and not too long after, Carly Simon went solo, finally daring to perform her solo songs.

I like the idea of the Simon Sisters launching a nascent career on the sails of a children’s lullaby. After all the lyrics, from Eugene Field’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” tell the story of a dream, about three fishermen who “sailed off in a wooden shoe” to fish among the stars. (“Now cast your nets wherever you wish— / Never afeard are we!” the stars tell them.) The poem promises “beautiful things” and “wonderful sights that be”; it’s no wonder the sisters’ audiences were charmed by the wistful tune. Likewise, when The Atlantic reviewed Field’s work in our August 1896 issue, the editors were especially enchanted by his poems for children:

Here the most guarded critic can forget his qualms, and yield himself whole-heartedly to a new and naïve fascination. … One has to go to Schumann’s Kinderscenen for a parallel rendering of the silver-gray phantasmagoria, half dream, half waking gleams and splinterings of fancy, that Field has given us in The Fly-Away Horse, and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. …

Strangely enough, too, in the handling of these sympathetic subjects, many of the technical limitations of the poet’s gift which we have noticed are refined quite away. Elsewhere his sense of style is dull or non-existent; here the diction springs new as a flower out of rich deposits of nursery tradition, and the tune, starting with the swing of a cradle or the to-and-fro of a grand dame’s rockerless chair, leaps and lingers and bickers and swirls like the spirit of water. …

It is no small thing to voice the joys and woes of one whole stage of the earthly journey, however short, especially when that stage is full of the most enormous little psychic adventures. This Field has done. He has written the Canterbury Pilgrimage of infancy.

And off the pilgrims sail.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

How should one aurally mark the occasion of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature? One could, if one was foolish, ask a Dylanologist to name his or her favorite Dylan tune; to do so is to open a Pandora’s box full of hot air. Still, a few nominations would float to the top of the list: the sublime “I’m Not There,” a semi-lost track from The Basement Tapes; a mid-career masterpiece like “Blind Willie McTell”; one of the early landmarks, “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

I’m not sure what my favorite Dylan tune is, but my pick for the best would probably be the most conventional one: “Tangled Up in Blue.” (Fittingly for Dylan, an artist inseparable from the great American folk tradition, it’s an opinion I inherited from my parents.) It might, in fact, be the greatest song in popular music.

In his excellent piece on the award this morning, my colleague Spencer grapples with the deathless fight over Dylan’s literary-ness. Like Michiko Kakutani, I am loath to separate Dylan’s lyrics from his music, but I am hard-pressed to see how he doesn’t qualify as literature. Many of Dylan’s best songs are short stories, with complete universes and plots, whether the crisply formed tales like “Black Diamond Bay” or the woozy, dissolving late talking blues “Highlands.”

“Tangled Up in Blue” fits somewhere in the middle. There’s a full cast of characters, a set of indelible images, a variety of settings. But the song also features an unreliable narrator; it’s not clear how the episodes described fit together, where and when they all occur, or who precisely the characters are. Is the “she” mentioned in the song constant throughout, or is there more than one woman? (Adding to the confusion, Dylan sometimes performs the song, written in the first person, in the third person.)

Perhaps the bard was even asserting his own place in the literary tradition with the song. At one point in the narrative, Dylan picks up a woman who’s working in a topless bar.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century

Who is he referring to? One common guess is Dante. Dylan himself has said Plutarch, though he likely meant Petrarch. During his Christian phase, Dylan often rewrote the lyrics to refer to various verses of the book of Jeremiah. Sometimes he omits it altogether. The narrator goes on:

And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

Dylan is divisive, and proselytizing for him tends to be painful for both the Bob obsessive and the Bob skeptic, but for millions of listeners (and the Nobel Committee), this description of the enigmatic 13th-century poet could just as easily describe the effect of Dylan’s own work.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

I only noticed this particular Track of the Day theme today, and I immediately went back through the previous entries to make sure you hadn’t run this one already. The Cure’s reference to Camus’s The Stranger is made pretty explicit in the refrain (“I’m alive / I’m dead / I’m the stranger / Killing an Arab”), but back in high school—when I both heard the song and read the book for the first time within a month of each other—I thought the song was a pretty good distillation of the novel’s central themes. Having read it a few more times since then, I now think it’s fairly superficial—but considering that the boys were not far out of high school themselves at the time, I think it holds up pretty well.

“Vincent” is often known by its first line, “Starry starry night,” after Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous painting. While the lyrics contain references to many of the artist’s other works—“morning fields of amber grain,” “flaming flowers that brightly blaze,” and more—I think it’s safe to say The Starry Night is the one work of art that the song best sums up. The unfurling swirls of color in the painting are mirrored by the movements of a wistful melody that seems to ask a question in each line, and the notes of McLean’s acoustic guitar capture the rippling texture of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes.

Update: I set out in writing this note to recommend a musical take on a visual artist, but reader Dave does me one better, with a song that “‘sheds new light’ on that under-appreciated folk singer and songwriter, Don McLean”:

“Vincent” was actually one of his only two songs that broke through into the pop charts. (The other was “American Pie.”) If you’d like a much more obscure track that highlights McLean’s writing talents even more effectively than “Vincent,” try listening to a poignant little ditty that will remind you of the “Mr. Cellophane” song from the musical Chicago. It’s called “Circus Song.”

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

This song from jazz singer Kurt Elling “has been captivating me since I first heard it in 1999,” says reader Shana:

I had heard a different Elling song on the radio, and I went out and bought his Live album, recorded at the Green Mill in Chicago. The album included “My Foolish Heart,” an old standard and what has become one of my very favorite Elling songs. But Kurt frequently changes standards, adds to them, reinvents them ... which is what he did with this one. When I heard his version, I had no idea that he was including writing from St. John of the Cross. (I am so not religious, and when I was “religious,” if you could call it that, it was Jewish, and I was a child). I just fell in love with the song, the way he sang it, the emotive quality, the words and lyrics, and, not least, his astounding voice.

I’m including a link to an article written by someone who probably knows a little more than me about ancient Christian mysticism, and religion in general. Enjoy!

Halfway through the song, the band drifted into one of those breaks that jazz bands do, where everyone gets a chance to play a little solo. Then Hobgood’s piano drifted off, and all that was left was the low throb of the bass and drums. Elling began to sing in his five–octave baritone:

One dark night
Fired with love’s urgent longings
Clothed in sheer grace
I went out unseen
My house being all now still

On that night
In secret for no one saw me
With no other light that the one that burned in my heart
This guided me more surely than the light of noon
To where she waited for me

It was St. John of the Cross. Elling was commingling “My Foolish Heart” with a 16th–century Christian mystic. I felt a sparkler ride up my spine. …

Elling reached the end of St. John, and the band roared back to the finale of “My Foolish Heart.” This was one of the most staggeringly brilliant explorations of John Paul II's Theology of the Body I had ever witnessed. In ten minutes Elling made the point that John Paul the Great made in 500 pages: our bodily love is an icon of the love of God. St. John venturing out in “the mystic night” for God was following the same path trod by the speaker in “My Foolish Heart.”

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 626-line tale of a cursed sailor’s sin and redemption is a lot to take in, I soon discovered, if you haven’t read it before. Luckily, bass player Steve Harris’s lyrics provide a pretty straightforward summary, and the music—shifting from shouted lyrics and frantic guitars as Death descends on the mariner’s ship, to a spooky, atmospheric section that recalls a glassy sea—helps to dramatize the mariner’s story. Heavy metal and Romantic poetry might seem like an unlikely combination, but the noise, the drama, and the driving beat of Iron Maiden’s interpretation feel right for Coleridge’s horror story—most of all because they capture the urgency of a curse that forces the mariner to tell his tale, as the song repeatedly puts it, “on and on and on.” Update from Max:

I would have written something about how the track led me to Coleridge, culminating in a hard slog of a course on 17th-century British literature; about how Iron Maiden always managed to throw a bit of history or literature on the albums back in the ’70s and ’80s, and how it led to greater discovery; or how my friends always thought that “Rime” was kind of the worst Iron Maiden song, but it was my favorite. But, it’s fiscal year closeout here at my office, and so really nuts.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

Hello, and greetings from Hong Kong. You asked about a piece of “music that transforms, or emulates, or sheds new light on a different work of art.” One such is David Gilmour (vocalist and guitarist in Pink Floyd) singing Shakespeare’s sonnet number 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.” Everything about the recording is sublime, from the lyrics to Gilmour’s voice to the simple piano arrangement to the location. It was recorded on a century-old houseboat on the River Thames at Hampton, which Gilmour transformed into a fantastic recording studio.

I first heard the song a few years ago and listened to it so often that to this day I can recite the entire sonnet while mentally humming along with the song in my head. It also reintroduced to me to Shakespeare’s poetry, which I had largely ignored in the 30 years since I was required to read it when I was a teenager.

I wish I’d known about this song when I, too, was studying Shakespeare’s sonnets as a teenager. On top of the sheer beauty of Gilmour’s recording, the melody helps reveal some of the sonnet’s structural elements. That moment when he pitches his voice up on “But thy eternal summer”? That’s the volta, or turn, at which the sonnet begins to shift from its initial argument toward a final conclusion. In this case, the conclusion is that the sonnet itself, unlike a brief summer day, will live on forever—and in giving the poem a new life through music, Gilmour has certainly helped.

Update: Malcolm also flags an album, When Love Speaks, that includes dramatic readings and some musical recordings of more than 50 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. You can find it here.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

Last week, I premiered “Chicago,” a new track from David Nagler’s new album of poems using Carl Sandburg’s poetry as lyrics. A reader, James Parsons, wrote me about another band, which took not just a name but also some song titles from the famous opening lines of the same poem Nagler used, which deem the city

Hog Butcher for the World
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.

Here’s James:

Your entry immediately brought to mind one of my favorite-ever bargain-bin cassette finds, the album Big Shoulders by Chicago blues-rock-polka outfit Big Shoulders. Instrumental tracks end each side of the album (this is how old I am, albums … and sides!), side one with “Big Shoulders” (they really, really milked that moniker for all it was worth) and side two with “Shoulder Suite” [embedded below], which I think I like a little better, but that’s today.

Obviously their whole thematic existence is heavily informed by Sandburg’s poem, and I’ve always run the opening stanza through my head whenever listening to either track. They’re also equally excellent to play on the car stereo as you take any expressway into the city or tool down Lake Shore Drive.

(Submit a song via hello@. Track of the Day archive here. Pre-Notes archive here.)

Earlier this week, my colleague David featured the premiere of “Chicago” by David Nagler—a track from an album based on the poems of Carl Sandburg. To me, turning a poem into a song seemed like the ultimate cross-genre cover—a jump not just to a new musical style, but to an entirely different art form. So I put out a call in our daily newsletter for more songs based on works of literature or visual art. Keith Wells delivers:

In the mid-’70s, Ambrosia had a minor hit with “Nice, Nice, Very Nice,” with lyrics adapted from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle (he, of course, shared a writing credit for the song). In high school, I was a huge Vonnegut fan and thought it was crazy when I heard the song for the first time. It helped that I immediately liked the song on its own merits.

Apparently, Vonnegut did too. Keith quotes a letter Vonnegut wrote to the band in January 1976:

I was at my daughter’s house last night, and the radio was on. By God if the DJ didn’t play our song, and say it was number ten in New York, and say how good you guys are in general. You can imagine the pleasure that gave me. Luck has played an enormous part in my life. Those who know pop music keep telling me how lucky I am to be tied in with you. And I myself am crazy about our song, of course, but what do I know and why wouldn’t I be? This much I have always known, anyway: Music is the only art that’s really worth a damn. I envy you guys.

Do you know a piece of music that transforms, or emulates, or sheds new light on a different work of art? Please send it our way: hello@theatlantic.com.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians appeared to tell a simple truth. A second video called that story into question. But neither shows what truly happened.

In a short, viral videoshared widely since Friday, Catholic high school students visiting Washington from Kentucky for the March for Life appeared to confront, and mock, Native Americans who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March taking place the same day.

By Saturday, the video had been condensed into a single image: One of the students, wearing a Make American Great Again hat, smiles before an Omaha tribal elder, a confrontation viewers took as an act of aggression by a group of white youth against an indigenous community—and by extension, people of color more broadly. Online, reaction was swift and certain, with legislators, news outlets, and ordinary people denouncing the students and their actions as brazenly racist.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

A controversial video of Catholic students clashing with American Indians appeared to tell a simple truth. A second video called that story into question. But neither shows what truly happened.

In a short, viral videoshared widely since Friday, Catholic high school students visiting Washington from Kentucky for the March for Life appeared to confront, and mock, Native Americans who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March taking place the same day.

By Saturday, the video had been condensed into a single image: One of the students, wearing a Make American Great Again hat, smiles before an Omaha tribal elder, a confrontation viewers took as an act of aggression by a group of white youth against an indigenous community—and by extension, people of color more broadly. Online, reaction was swift and certain, with legislators, news outlets, and ordinary people denouncing the students and their actions as brazenly racist.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.